Murder HE Writes: Gregg Olsen

Welcome to Gregg Olsen, our guest for Murder HE Writes. I was lucky enough to “meet” Gregg on-line, and we became fast friends. Partly because he writes AMAZING books — both dark, twisty psychological suspense and dark, twisty true crime. Partly because I became his mentor through International Thriller Writers. But mostly because Gregg is one of the most genuinely nice guys you’d ever meet. You’d never know he writes about murder, mayhem and the macabre. And for those of you with YA’s in the house (or those like me who enjoy a good YA thriller) — Gregg also has a bestselling YA supernatural thriller series. (And, he’s often a commentator on the news related to true crime stories.) Enjoy Gregg’s fascinating (and scary!) blog. ~ Allison

On living in the Pacific Northwest: The serial killers around us

It’s as true as there are Starbucks on every corner. When it comes to the Seattle area and serial killers, if you swing a dead cat (fitting, right?) you’ll surely hit a body dumpsite. We’ve had so many of them here. We don’t brag about it, of course. But we don’t deny it, either. We just know that serial killers are a part of the northwest.

They just are.

When I look at the trajectory of my life I can easily see where my path has crossed that of a serial killer. More than a time or two. In fact, at least three. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time. The first serial killer that I’ll mention here was the inspiration for Fear Collector my latest thriller.

Ted

When I was sixteen, my parents took my brothers and me to Lake Sammamish State Park, east of where I grew up in the suburbs of Seattle. It was July 14, 1974. When we arrived it was so busy, so wall-to-wall packed with people, cars and boats, that we could not find a place to park the car. My dad circled the parking lot once or twice and gave up.

So much for a family outing.

Shortly thereafter we’d learned that two young women went missing from the park that very day. I can still see Denise Naslund and Janice Ott’s photographs in my mind. I think many of us in the Northwest picture those girls. They were beautiful, young, with cascades of dark hair.

They looked like many of the girls who would fill the pages of the Seattle Times for many years.

With Denise and Janice’s disappearance, we finally had a name for the menace who was stealing our sisters, girlfriends, daughters. “Ted.” We also knew he had a VW. His arm was in a sling. He’d asked some girls to help him get his sailboat onto his car. Some refused. Janice and Denise had helped the stranger.

Theodore Robert Bundy had been at Lake Sammamish that same day my dad circled the parking lot before giving up and heading back home. We – meaning all of us in the Pacific Northwest – were in the midst of a murder spree that changed and challenged what we thought who and what might be evil incarnate. Ted was handsome. Educated. He was charismatic and charming. He trolled college campuses for women, who some psychologists later said resembled a girlfriend who had jilted him.

As nearly everyone who studies crime knows, Ted is one of the worst serial killers in the annals of crime. Not for his number of victims – another of Seattle’s own, Gary Ridgway beats Bundy’s horrific kill count by almost double. Ted admitted to killing 35 before being put to death in Florida’s electric chair. He was the worst because he just didn’t seem like the type. There was nothing “weird” or “creepy” about him.

Before Ted we always thought a murderer looked scary. Not like the boy next door.

Songs always bring me back to the time and place. The number one song at the time we went looking for that parking space at the lake was “Rock Your Baby” by George McCrae.

Gary

Ten years later, when I was 26 and newly married, my wife and I worked at camping company creating the content and art for its membership magazine. The offices were located near SeaTac Airport and our apartment was in Federal Way, about ten miles south. Every day we’d commute on Military Road past Star Lake, a dilapidated shopping center, and a pet cemetery. During that time the news had covered a series of murders dubbed the Green River Killer – for the location of one of his primary body dump sites.

Swing a dead cat? Oh yes.

In March of 1984, the remains of four women – Delores Williams, 17, Terry Milligan, 16, Sandra Grabbert, 17, and Alma Smith, 18 – a cluster of young victims was discovered. There were others there too, Gail Mathews, 23 and Carrie Rois, 15.

All the time I was working at the camping company, Gary Ridgway, a truck painter, who lived a mile two away from our office, was hunting in our midst – and had been since 1982 when the first victims were found along the banks of the Green River. His MO was simple. He invited young prostitutes into his vehicle, took them home or to a remote site, and strangled them to death.

While we were going on with our normal lives, going to work, out to dinner, catching a plane for a vacation from the northwest gloom, Ridgway was doing what he did. Relentless. Shark-like. No one knows for sure how many he killed – he admitted to 49 so that he’d be spared the death penalty. Some experts think the number of his victims could be doubled.

He’s a killer, a coward, and the state showed more mercy than he ever did.

When I was in my mid-thirties and the father of two, we decided to move our family to Olalla, Washington, a tiny community in the country across Puget Sound from Seattle and Tacoma. It seemed like a better place to raise to young girls. On my first day in there, a woodworker, told me about Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard and her serial killing spree around the turn of the century. I was intrigued and eventually wrote the book, Starvation Heights. Today, I live on land that was platted and named for by one of her victims.

But Dr. Hazzard is not the serial killer whose path I crossed that I’m including here. I’m thinking of another.

On August 25th, 1995, word circulated that a woman’s body was found up on Peacock Hill Road here in Olalla. She’d been wrapped in a sleeping back and tucked into a ditch on the side of the road about a mile from where I live. Her name, we learned, was Patricia Barnes. She’d been many things in her sad life, including homeless. She’d last been seen in the Seattle area.

It was only later that we learned that Patricia was a victim of Robert Lee Yates, Jr., a man who’d murdered more than a half dozen women (most of which were prostitutes) in Spokane, and other parts of Washington state. He’s spree went on undetected by his wife or five children for years. Like Ridgway, he targeted street girls (though oddly, his first victims many years earlier were a young couple out on a date).

While most victims were dumped in rural areas like near our home in Olalla, one had been buried outside Robert Yates’ bedroom window in Spokane – right under his wife’s nose.

The Yates case was a messy story of an Army National Guardsman, a pilot, an upstanding citizen, masquerading as normal. It was about a man who sought power and sex and showed not one whit of mercy. While I don’t favor the death penalty as a rule, I’m glad that he’s now on Death Row. I wish Ridgway was there, too.

For a long time, when I drove down Peacock Hill, I tried to find the spot where Patricia had been dumped like garbage. There was no marker like there often are for accident victims. I haven’t thought about her in awhile. And yet I know someone out there misses her.

Allison Brennan is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of nearly three dozen romantic thrillers and mysteries, including the Lucy Kincaid series and the Max Revere series. She lives in Northern California with her husband, five children, and assorted pets.

Wow, that’s totally creepy (and legend!). No (recent) serial killers in my current city, but I do live a couple of kilometres away from the Marathon bombing site and cycle past it several times a week (and I was down there the day before the Marathon!). It’s surreal.

Greg, I live in Montana. We attract crazies, but I don’t believe we’ve had a serial killer. Of course we have the mutilated cattle and UFO sightings where I live. Great stuff for getting the imagination going!

Hi Gregg, I’m a PWNer, too, and serial killers are almost always my antagonists. I read a ton of true crime growing up. Ann Rule’s books were a staple for me. I read the Ted Bundy book a half dozen times. I live near where he dumped two in Oregon. (I think there were two…) I want to say they only found the skulls. My mother worked at the hospital where Diane Downs brought her children after she shot them. Obviously not a serial killer, but a sick “mother…”

When I first moved to Sacramento, I lived walking distance from where Dorathea Puente killed her boarders for their social security/disability checks, then buried their bodies in the back yard. I remember shortly after moving there a friend of mine drove me by the house and told me the story. I’ve used the reference in at least two of my Sacramento-set books. There are more serial killers in the greater Sacramento area, but Puente impacts me the most because she was a grandmotherly type. It was just not expected …

Hi Kendra,
I actually spent 8 hours visiting with Diane Downs in prison in Calif. She was a complete nut job. She told me she had a lover in prison (a guard) and that she knew “how to do things to men that other women have no idea how to do”…

Oh shoot, I forgot about Jonah-Barr. I have a friend who works at the crime lab. When they brought in some of his personal items she said she didn’t want to touch them even with gloves on. 🙂

I also forgot about Merhoffer. He took a little girl out of a tent out by Three Forks in the 1970s and others. He also served his victims to neighbors and friends. Parts of one woman were found in his freezer. They never found out how many he’d killed because they let him kill himself in jail even though the police would deny it.

Cris, about the bombing site… when our girls were younger we made a Boston trip and stayed at the Westin in Copley Square…. the location of all press briefings. I’m sure you will never pass by that location without thinking of those people waiting for their friends and loved ones to cross the finish line…such a moment of joy…destroyed by those twisted brothers. I guess the surviving brother has a fan club of teen girls now…reminds me of all the women who loved the Mendendez boys years ago. Ugh!

Willa, I can’t really come up with a great answer on why all my books feature strong women in the central roles. Part of it is that I have always admired women in law enforcement. I guess ANY woman who does what was once a “man’s” job. When my girls were little we read them “He Bear She Bear” and it was all about that women/girls could be anything a boy/man could be. I’m so proud to have daughters… I tell everyone at my house I swim in a sea of estrogen…even the male dog Milo doesn’t even know to lift his leg! He’s a squatter like our female dog. More than you wanted to know! Thanks for being so welcoming to me on the blog.

And thanks so much to the amazingly kind and smart Allison Brennan for asking me. You all know her from her writing, so you know, what I know….there’s no one better.

I have been, I hate to use the word fascinated, maybe intrigued by the idea of so many serial killers in the Northwest. Now that I’m watching The Following it is just downright scary. Will have to go check out some books by Gregg.

I loved THE FOLLOWING. My favorite new show of the season. I liked that it was a short format (15 episodes) and the writing and acting was top notch. I was totally willing to suspend disbelief. I plan to watch it again this summer with my older daughters.

I grew up in small town of Crescent City, CA. In the 60’s when I was in the 6th grade a young teenager was murdered. Rumors always followed that story. Such as , money bought a conviction. Years later (70’s) a young female hitchhiker was found on “old highway 199) slung over a tree disemboweled. Never learned if anyone ever was caught.

Wow Gregg, didn’t know you we’re from my neck of the woods so to speak. I also was at Lake Sammamish that day Ted was and also at the tavern The Flame the night he took Brenda Ball. I’ve always considered myself lucky for escaping the horror. And I live in Seatac where Gary frequented the strip so I know what you mean about swinging a dead cat. Kind of creeps me out at times. Love your books by the way.

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Bio:

Allison Brennan

Allison Brennan is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of nearly three dozen romantic thrillers and mysteries, including the Lucy Kincaid series and the Max Revere series. She lives in Northern California with her husband, five children, and assorted pets.